I drive to the medical center trying my best to distract myself with a podcast I’d saved just for the occasion, but once I check in and sit down it’s no longer possible to forget that it’s time for my …
Back to School, Back to Work
Embracing the Rhythm of the School Year As much as I anticipate and love summer, by the time we get to about mid-August I am looking forward to the start of the school year. I don't exactly throw …
Easy and Effective Ways to Encourage Your Young Athlete
Spring and summer are all about baseball in my house. Then just when baseball is winding down, soccer starts up in earnest. Between my two sons, it sometimes seems as though most of my time is spent …
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Find Your Flow
When I speak to groups of moms with young children, I ask them to close their eyes and think of the last time they felt themselves relax into the moment so much that they lost all sense of …
Mom, I Don’t Pray
“I don’t pray,” my ten-year-old son said the other day at the dinner table, and my heart just about stopped. “What?” I said. “What do you mean? Why not? What happened?” My head filled with even more …
When You Feel Like You’re Not a Good Enough Mom
I studied all the wrong things in school. Based on my daily life, I would have been much better off had I studied nursing, nutrition, defensive carpool driving, physical therapy, and child psychology. …
The Spiritual Practice You Didn’t Know You Were Doing
Several days a week my 2-year-old daughter and I walk several blocks to our church, either for services or Bible study or for her morning preschool. We live so close that I often tell people it's …
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Cancer-Free: A Resolution of Gratitude
On December 28 I went to the cancer center for my yearly mammogram. Because my initial surgery to remove my breast cancer was in December, this anxiety-producing ritual now falls at the end of each …
Teaching Kids to Talk (and Listen) to God
I once shocked a bunch of kids while giving a children's sermon. I told them it didn't matter if they bowed their heads or even folded their hands when they prayed. That they certainly …
The Secret to Working at Home with Small Children
I've been working at home for almost 15 years now, both before and after becoming a mom of three. Over the years I've learned many lessons about getting work done at home, in the midst of diapers, …
Daily Tasks Are Real Life
My daughter is 15 months old. What that means for my house is that there is no safe place to keep the toilet brush. That as I put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, she is joyfully unloading them …
One Easy Way to Simplify Family Life
This time of year many of us start to think about simplicity. Practicing Christian simplicity is about doing less or having less in order to focus more on God. I think many of us want to better …
Holy Labor
Childbirth is an exciting and terrifying prospect. For each of my three pregnancies, as my stomach grew larger, so did my anxiety and dread about the birth itself. Just as the marriage is more …
The Three Lessons of Losing
We just returned home from a weekend soccer tournament. Three games and no wins—one tie and two losses. The second game was a bad loss, one where none of us were quite sure what the final …
On Having a New Baby and Breast Cancer
I was explaining to someone a few months ago that I was in chemotherapy and she looked in confusion at my five-month-old in the stroller right next to us. “But you have a baby!” I know, I …
What I’ve Learned from My Cancer Diagnosis
I was 39 weeks pregnant when I was diagnosed with breast cancer last October. I’m not sure what (or who) exactly caused me to ask my nurse-practitioner to do a breast …
Have You Affirmed Your Family Today?
Last week at dinner my younger son casually turned to me and said, “These are the things I like about you, Mommy, that you play Legos with me, that you play puppies with me, that you hug me and that …
Mom of Boys and. . .
I often tweet with the hashtag #momofboys. I’ve realized over the past (almost) nine years of being a mom of one and then two boys how much a part of my identity this has become. I think of myself as …
Three Ways to Listen Better to God
My church recently held an all-night prayer vigil. Each of us could sign up for a half-hour (or longer) shift. I was lucky enough to get the very decent 9 a.m. shift and arrived in the little chapel …
How to Help a Depressed New Mom
I’ll just come out with it: I’m an eavesdropper. I love to write and edit in coffee shops, partly because I can’t procrastinate by doing laundry and partly because I love to hear the snippets of …
